Volume 51, Number 2 · February 12, 2004
Winged Messages
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Angels in America
directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay by Tony Kushner, based on his play.
a TV film in two parts, Aired on HBO December 7 and 14, 2003.
'Angel,' a word that today can have connotations at once sublime and a bit saccharine, ultimately derives from a rather mundane classical Greek masculine noun of the second declension, angelos: 'messenger.' In Greek, it's not a very exciting word at all—no more so than, say, 'postman' or 'radio announcer' is in English. If you happened to be an ancient Greek and had some bit of news or a message you needed to get across, an angelos was the man for the job; or, rather, angelos was the way you referred to anyone who ended up doing the job. In Greek tragedies, for instance, the character who delivers those famous fact-packed 'messenger speeches'—the ones in which we learn how Oedipus handles the news that he's adopted, or just what's inside those nicely wrapped gift boxes that Medea sends to her ex's new bride—is referred to as, simply, the angelos. The related verb, angellein, 'to announce,' is equally unsensational. When the great lyric poet Simonides of Keos wrote, in his old age, the famous epitaph for the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae—'Go tell the Spartans that here we lie'—the word we translate as 'tell' was angellein. However exciting his news might be, the classical Greek angelos was, generally, a featureless vehicle for transmitting crucial knowledge.
Review, 6759 words
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